For most of his time in office, Vladimir Putin has worked hard to hide his personality. There have been occasional revelatory moments where he has shown character, generally in the form of petulance and pettiness. These have been exceptions rather than the norm.

he result has been that people have read what they have wanted to into Putin. In the first years of his rule, this worked to his advantage. Western leaders such as Tony Blair, George W Bush (who infamously looked into Putin’s eyes, saw his soul and liked what he saw) and Gerhard Schröder saw him as someone they could do business with.

Likewise, many Russians believed he shared their values. In the early 2000s, they saw Putin as someone very different to his precedessor Boris Yeltsin: sober, clear-eyed, active, young and untainted with the disasters of Russia’s 1990s. For nationalists, he was a nationalist; for liberals, he was an economic liberal and had Western friends. Most importantly, he was someone who believed in the restoration of law and order for people fearful of the disorder of post-communist Russia.

The passage of time, and the invasion of Ukraine and the horrors that it has brought, have tarnished Putin’s brand. He is now seen as the personification of evil, and we should, it has been argued, have always known he was this bad. Everything that has happened in the last 20 years in Russia is his fault in this view: Putin is simply the old KGB personified and in power.

But what’s the truth about Putin, between “the hope of many, East and West” in the early 2000s and “the Stalinist/fascist/imperialist/would-be totalitarian” (delete as fits your preference) of 2022?

Philip Short’s book is the best place to look for an answer to this question. This is the first full biography of Putin and it is unlikely to be matched as a study of the man for some time. It is readable, judicious, critical but balanced, and focused on Putin the person, rather than on the Putin regime.

There is no ‘gotcha’ moment that explains Putin, no single childhood trauma or slight. Short builds up a picture of his character — enigmatic, a mixture of emotional coldness, fits of anger and epic grudge-bearing, and very much focused on himself — by telling his life story straightforwardly and without empty psychologising.

The distinction between Putin the person and the regime is important. His power is great but not absolute; he does not dictate everything that happens. Short’s analysis of the political murders that have happened during his rule is a case in point. He can only firmly link one murder — the polonium poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko — and one attempted murder – the novichok poisoning of Alexei Navalny — to Putin. This does not excuse him of complicity in other killings, of course. He may not have ordered other murders, but he did nothing to see those that ordered them were punished.

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Putin’s character has shaped the regime he heads, especially over the last decade. His coldness, begrudgery and self-centredness motivate him to hold on to power but don’t always make him an active ruler. His neglect of anything but his own power and status allows the regime to do bad things, not always because he wills them but because he does nothing to end corruption, incompetence, bad governance or the toadyism that prompts subordinates to kill on his behalf. Short’s Putin either does not feel the pain his regime causes or does not care.

This has been particularly noticeable since he came back to the presidency in 2012 after a spell as prime minister under president Dmitry Medvedev. Putin returned because Medvedev began to think too much of himself and because Putin did not trust him to maintain political stability. Putin had no a grand plan for his new presidential terms. His promotion of traditional moral values as Russia’s ideology after 2012 were a means of excluding and persecuting liberals rather than the basis for Russia’s renewal. Consequently, Short implies, he has been in power for the last decade not because he wants to achieve anything but because he can.

This view might seem at odds with his pursuit of great power status in Crimea, Syria and Ukraine. Short’s book was being set up to print when the war against Ukraine erupted so his coverage of it is necessarily brief. That war, like earlier foreign policy adventures, fits the idea of a semi-detached Putin, however.

Foreign policy aggression allows Putin to indulge his penchant for making arguments about Russia’s necessary historical greatness and blame the West for not accepting this and unfairly persecuting his country. He may be too jaded to bother with the complexities of domestic politics, but he gets status from foreign adventures. Achieving economic growth is hard. Getting praise for foreign adventurism is easy when you control the media, and it shouts your praises about foreign victories and hides the casualty figures.

While Putin engages in deadly power games, his regime keeps ticking over. When Putin finally goes, this messy, corrupt, incompetent, and violent regime will live on after him for a long time as a problem for Russia and the world. There’s no better guide as to why this will be Putin’s fault than this exceptional book.

Biography: Putin: His Life and Times by Philip Short
Bodley Head, 864 pages, paperback €22.90; e-book £10.99

Neil Robinson is professor of politics at the University of Limerick